It is enough to play a little bit of The Caligula Effect: Overdose. It’s another game that would have ended up as “the one that got away” in my mind if I hadn’t tried it. The ideas are great, I love the publisher (Furyu) and I usually enjoy high school RPG shenanigans, but the battle system is just too sluggish and drawn out to be fun.
The story about people trapped in a fantasy world by a well-meaning AI is interesting enough. I can think of few things more nightmarish than being trapped in high school again, ew, ew. So I’m definitely rooting for the main characters to make it out of there and back to their normal lives, whatever those may have been. I’m just not rooting hard enough to fight those endless battles.
This is where I would normally explain the system, try to find some screenshots, maybe even a video to prove my point. But I’m beyond that point now. Now I realize I ain’t gotta explain diddly. Though I suppose it would be helpful to explain exactly what bothered me: too much time is spent entering commands and seeing how they play out via a simulation before actually committing to that course of action. You essentially play every turn twice in a turn-based RPG. Intriguing idea, horrible to actually play.
Turn-based SRPGs often have something similar where they show you your chance of success and the expected damage, but that’s a quick series of numbers, not a full-on animation. All that faffing about every single turn of combat killed my motivation. It wasn’t so bad in the first half-hour because I only had one party member to control. But they quickly added two more and now I’m expected to simulate every single turn to make sure everyone attacks with the right timing to launch or knock down enemies and avoid or counter attacks. Every battle takes forever, and that’s not even factoring in the unnecessarily long attacking and “roaring” motions the enemies make. It’s only been an hour and I’m already tired.
Now then, I’ve been playing games for a long time. So I know it’s possible, nay, likely that things will get faster and more interesting as you get more characters, stronger equipment and more powerful attacks. However I’m too old and impatient for that “gets better after 30 hours” thing. Get better after 30 minutes or get out.
That said, the idea is great and I have good memories of a more basic type of this system in the Grandia games (especially cancelling enemy’s telegraphed attacks). So this isn’t a blanket condemnation of The Caligula Effect: Overdose‘s battle system. It’s just not for me at this point in time.
The story also lost me a little bit when it turned out that those 500 school mates you can befriend and add to your party are faceless with barely any personality. I’m so naive I actually thought they would create 500 individual character portraits and stories, but even Suikoden struggles with 108 so my expectations were too high.
TL;DR I’m too lazy to play The Caligula Effect: Overdose. Gotta find something easier for my hamster brain to process. Right now that something is Dissidia: Final Fantasy – Opera Omnia coupled with a little Genshin Impact here and there. I want to start Tokyo Xanadu eX+ again and run it through properly, but I promise this is the last time I will mention it on this blog until/unless I finish it.
45 days until Xenoblade Chronicles 3!
it’s very understandable, Overdose, as interesting as some of the ideas and characters were was just too incompetent of a game mechanically to be worth it unless you have ALOT of patience. It’s why I’d recommend skipping 1/Overdose and going straight to 2 to people most of the time. To start the dungeons were much more reasonable compared to the overlong corridor maze that give you almost no tangible reward for exploring it. Also the cast themselves were generally milder in temperament and made people less uncomfortable with their behavior. As a result, they ended up being a lot more likable and had much better dynamic as a group. As for the combat, while still has the play every turn twice issue, limits itself to queuing up 1 action per turn and gives you competent enough AI for the party members in normal mode so you don’t have to micromanage all of them. If you find the game interesting but just can’t put up with just how much jank is involved, I’d still recommend trying out 2 because it does try its best to be a much smoother experience while retaining the good part of the first game.
Sounds good to me. I was indeed curious about whether 2 would fix the many errors of 1. They had some good ideas, but if the gameplay is draggy, it’s all for naught. I’ll try CE2 sometime (probably).